Italian Cities Vie for Culture Capital Status

A glimpse of Piazza del Popolo, the city center of Ravenna, which is hoping to become a European Capital of Culture in 2019. Officials are emphasizing that Dante is buried there.Credit
Marco Gualazzini for The New York Times

RAVENNA, Italy — After six years of planning, and countless brainstorming sessions with citizens and institutions, Ravenna was ready on Thursday to face the panel of experts called on to decide which Italian city will be the European Capital of Culture in 2019.

Over the course of the past week, delegations from 21 Italian cities were called to Rome to try to convince the panel of 13 experts that their city is the most cultural of them all.

The European Capital of Culture initiative began 28 years ago to highlight the Continent’s rich diversity, while strengthening the ties that link different cultures and traditions throughout Europe, and, hopefully, transforming the chosen cities into tourist magnets.

More than 40 cities have been singled out since the program began. Since 2011, two capitals from different European countries have been chosen. Italy and Bulgaria will host the initiative in 2019, and each will choose a city to represent it. Besides offering a yearlong program of events emphasizing the city’s hidden strengths (in Ravenna, organizers want to plump up the fact that Dante, usually associated with Florence, is buried there), the initiative is often seen as an opportunity to regenerate a town’s image.

To be considered for the preselection, candidate cities had to submit an application by Sept. 20, which gave an overview of scheduled events for the year and detailed frameworks for budgets and management of the event. A short list of cities, likely five or six, will be announced Friday evening, Italian officials said. Those cities will be asked to submit more detailed applications taking into account recommendations by the panel. A winner is expected to be declared in 2015.

Italy has an unusually high number of candidates this year. By comparison, Marseille ultimately muscled out seven other French cities to become the capital for 2013 while only three cities in the Czech Republic vied to be the capital in 2015.

The glut is not surprising in a country where the notion of “campanilismo” — denoting a proud attachment to one’s hometown — runs deep. Several of the cities now competing for the title can even boast of having once been the capitals of sundry duchies, principalities, maritime republics, or, in the case of Ravenna, the Western Roman Empire.

But the desire to be named a cultural capital is about more than local pride. As the economy suffers, candidates are also attracted by the potential financial benefits that the title can bring. Studies and estimates suggest that there is a return of 5 euros to 10 euros for every euro invested in a European Capital of Culture. Liverpool, a capital in 2008, is often given as an example. Studies showed that tourism rose 34 percent and the event generated millions in revenue.

“Being a capital of culture is an accelerator of a process and a catalyzer for resources” that can transform a city, said Alberto Cassani, the coordinator of Ravenna’s organizing committee.

In Italy, the competition is steep. Ravenna’s boast of making the Unesco World Heritage List — the town has eight Early Christian churches and monuments with mosaics — will not hold much sway with the selection panel. Nearly two-thirds of the other cities vying for the title, which include Lecce, Syracuse and Mantua, can make the same claim.

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For L’Aquila, the central Italian city devastated by an earthquake in 2009, organizers think that becoming the capital of culture would give a much-needed boost to the city’s reconstruction, which is struggling to take off. In Palermo, winning the competition is seen as a way of dealing a fresh blow to the Mafia.

Matera, the city of stone dwellings in the Basilicata region perhaps best known to film audiences as the set for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” is plugging itself as a southern success story. “It’s important for Italy to show that it is possible to recover pride in the growth of the south,” said Paolo Verri, the director of the organizing committee there. A city like Pisa, also in the running, “has always been extraordinary,” whereas Matera has overcome extreme poverty in the last century, he said. “Symbolically it would be an important victory.”

An Italian official discounted rumors that this year the application had been limited to 180 pages to curtail Italian loquacity. “You can imagine what it’s like when every city is free to do what it wants,” said Leila Nista, project manager of the Focus Point at the Culture Ministry, which oversees the contest.

As part of the application process, candidate cities developed catchy slogans, like Lecce’s “Reinventing Eutopia,” Taranto’s “Dolphins making love in the seas of Taranto,” presumably a reference to the marine mammals that find sanctuary there, or Aosta’s “Interaction, integration, sharing” along with a logo that recalls a stylized version of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.

Key to success is the support of local institutions and the public authorities for the candidacy, especially in terms of funding. But lack of funding has not deterred some of the candidates, notably Grosseto and the Maremma, in southwest Tuscany, which refused institutional backing. “Authorities are admitted surreptitiously: the aim is to promote every human and economic resource on a voluntary basis, in sincere participation, without pride. Power is a fashion,” read the application drafted by the promoters of the candidacy — a graphic artist and a musician-writer.

In Campania, officials at the region’s culture department were perplexed by the nomination of the Vallo di Diano and the Cilento, national parks whose nomination is supported by a private committee. An official said the region knew nothing about the candidacy and was instead backing Caserta, home to one of Italy’s most opulent royal palaces.

In making their choice, the jurors will be looking as much to the future as to a city’s past and the vision the city has for, and of, itself.

For Ravenna, that vision includes the regeneration of an abandoned dock area into a hub for creative activities. That project is on the drawing board regardless of whether the city wins the competition. “Yes, there is a plan B,” Mr. Cassani said. “But we very much believe in our chances.”

Correction: November 15, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Mel Gibson movie. The film is “The Passion of the Christ,” not “The Passion of Christ.”